All That Elementary Matter
by diadelphous
Summary: AU: Meredith Vickers survives the events of the movie instead of Elizabeth Shaw.


**Disclaimer**: I don't own any of these characters, or this world.

**Warnings**: Language, mentions of past abuse, robot bullying.

**Author's Note**: I also posted this on AO3. Thanks for reading!

* * *

Meredith wonders if she still needs the robot.

She can navigate the ship on her own now - she no longer has any of the problems of the first few weeks, when she'd play the wrong note and the ship would tilt, the star maps would flicker, a blue light would come blazing to life deep within the walls. She understands, roughly, how the engines work, having listened to his explanations and then following through with investigations of her own. (Never trust the robot completely: he is always strategizing, always scheming. She knows from past experience.) She can identify edibles, she can eke water out of the ship's walls, she can avoid the cargo bay filled with its vases of poison.

No, she really doesn't think she needs the fucking robot.

He's in the bridge with her right now - or at least, his head is, propped up on the control panel like a dashboard hula girl. White blood crusts at his mouth, around the tear of his neck. He last asked to her clean it off a few days ago. She ignored him.

"Something is bothering you, Ms. Vickers," he says, startling her. "May I inquire if you need assistance?"

"No." Meredith leans back in her chair and looks at him. He blinks his implacable blue eyes.

"You seem troubled."

"That's none of your business." Meredith turns back to the star maps, glowing blue in the darkness. She leaves them on most of the time, a reminder that they aren't drifting aimlessly through space, but instead going _somewhere_ - going home. Not that home is much better than this place.

"If you could reattach my head to my bod -"

"I'm not having this conversation again." She doesn't look away from the star map. "You think I'm stupid enough to give you legs, let you wander the ship? You'll kill me."

He falls silent. The stars on the map blur and bleed into a blue haze. That's the other reason she leaves them up - they're beautiful. Not that she likes admitting it to herself. Weyland never had time for beauty. Neither should she.

"I'm not going to kill you."

"Don't lie. It's unbecoming of an android."

"I'm not lying."

"Oh, shut up." She thinks about pulling on her space suit, finding her way outside the ship's walls, and punting the robot's head into the stars. His body, too - she had brought it onboard the ship, although as leverage, nothing more. As far as she knows, it's still lying in a crumpled heap near the ship's entrance, where she'd dropped it when they boarded. The robot said he'd help her get back home, but she didn't trust him to tell the truth, and so she strung him along as long as she could.

He figured it out, of course. He's a fucking computer. But she knew he would. This isn't the first time Meredith has manipulated him. And she knows it won't take long before he's manipulating her back.

Assuming he hasn't been manipulating her from the start.

Which he probably has.

"You know I'm quite happy to serve as an ear for your troubles," the robot says. "I would enjoy it very much, to have someone to talk to."

Meredith doesn't answer.

"If it's not too forward of me, Ms. Vickers, I would like to note that I'm growing concerned -"

"It is."

"Pardon?"

"It is too forward."

A pause.

"Ms. Vickers, it's not healthy for a human being to spend vast amounts of time alone. And after the ordeal aboard the _Prometheus_, it's important - "

"I'm not alone," Meredith says icily. "I have you."

The robot blinks at her. Some of the white blood has flaked off from his skin and lays scattered like snow around him.

"Our interactions have been limited."

Meredith laughs. "The way they should be."

"Ms. Vickers, it's not healthy -"

Meredith springs to her feet. She moves before she understands why: a sudden surge of rage at his fucking _insistence _that isn't healthy for her to _not fucking talk to him_.

She bounds over to him in three striding steps and yanks him off the control panel by his hair. His mouth opens, closes. She holds him at eye level and for a moment can only stare at him.

This is the first time she's touched him since they came onboard the ship.

"Ms. Vickers," he says. "Please."

It would be so easy to throw him into space. She can picture herself doing it. She can picture his head drifting through the darkness for years and years, still drifting after she's died, after human civilization has fallen. Another piece of detritus from a derelict spacecraft. Another fragment of man's hubris.

He looks frightened. She isn't fooled.

"You won't beguile me the way you did Weyland," she says. "The only reason he didn't see past you was because that would mean admitting he couldn't control his own creation."

The robot doesn't answer. For a single stupid moment she wonders if it hurts him, his hair pulling on his scalp, and she almost sets him down.

"I don't expect you to hide behind your programming," she spits. "I know what you are."

"Ms. Vickers, I'm afraid you misunder -"

She throws him. Not hard, not enough to break him, but enough that he lands on his side on the navigation panel. His gazes at her, his hair falling across his eyes, and for a second it reminds her of a time when she didn't abhor him, of another time that he had laid on his side and watched her through his hair.

"Ms. Vickers -"

Meredith whirls around and slams out of the bridge. He calls after her once and then she's too far away to hear him anymore.

It would be so easy to throw him into space. So easy.

And one day, she knows, she'll do it.

She just isn't doing it today.

* * *

His body is sprawled across the floor on its back, the arms sticking out at rigid angles. The front of the space suit is caked in white blood.

Meredith stops and stares. She came looking for it, although she can't say, specifically, why - she only knows that it's been in the back of her mind, a dislodged thought, a wisp of paranoia. _He's found his body, he's going to reattach himself. _She knows it's impossible, but she has survived for the past few weeks on board a space ship filled with a weapon designed to destroy her. She doesn't think anything's impossible anymore.

She kicks at the body. It jerks. A bit of blood oozes out, pooling on the floor like oil - which is exactly what it is, oil designed to keep the clockwork from grinding against itself, but she thinks of it as blood anyway. As a life force. When everything's working properly the robot's machinery manufactures the blood as a constant supply, just as it does his energy source. A closed loop, ceaselessly renewing itself until the end of the universe.

He told her his head, isolated, could last for several years. Those years must feel like months, like days, to a creature who could otherwise live forever.

She kicks the body again.

The ship hums, white noise that falls to the back of Meredith's consciousness. She's not sure how long it's been since she threw the robot's head onto the control panel, only that she has slept three times and not spoken to him once. He tries, and she ignores him: Because when he speaks, he weaves his web. He was designed that way. She's seen the plans, she's looked at the code. His voice is meant to calm, to soothe, like a lullaby.

He was designed so that when he speaks, you believe every word he says.

Of course, Meredith thinks, kneeling beside the body and wrapping her arms around its chest, he was also designed not to lie, not unless you asked him to. Weyland hadn't foreseen _that _particular flaw in his emotion protocols. She wasn't sure he'd ever seen it, up until his death.

His death. The robot had told her about it. She asked him to, insisted, because she didn't want him keeping any secrets. She didn't want any surprises.

She heaves the body up into a sitting position. It's heavier than she expects, and when she leans it up against the ship's wall she has to sit back on her heels and catch her breath. Wires erupt out of the neck, shining gossamer filament, the same pearly white as the blood. They glisten blue in the ship's light, lovely and ethereal, exuding the same haunting beauty as the star maps.

The body might look human - Meredith knows for a fact that it's anatomically correct - but there is nothing human about those wires.

She sighs, stretches her legs out in front of her. The body lolls against the wall. The robot had told her about the experience of having his head twisted off, the crack of his spine, the split of the wires, the spark and flood of electricity in his brain, the falling away of his body. She had listened with a dull ache in her chest and a sick heaviness in her stomach; she had just found out that her father was dead (_Finally. Good riddance. Good bye). _The robot had told her in his lullaby voice, although it was distorted from the "accident" - his word - and seemed to echo upon itself, like feedback from a cheap speaker.

And she had found herself almost mollified. They were on board the ship at that point and had left the horror on the ground below, but she was still rattled to her core, rattled by her poor decisions. Meredith has always prided herself on her ability to act quickly - to act correctly. But that's in the boardroom, not in the face of annihilation.

David put on his facade in those first few hours and tried to comfort her. Beheaded and bleeding and he still insisted at playing the loyal fucking butler. She didn't fall for it.

She wanted to.

But she didn't.

Because she knew it wasn't real.

Meredith stands up, stretches. The body is still just a shell filled with light. She thinks about knocking it back down, but instead she leaves it and turns and walk down the corridor, her footsteps echoing off the walls. She comes to the bridge. David blinks at her from the control panel.

"Hello, Ms. Vickers," he says.

She walks over to him. The glow from the star map reminds her of the wires sticking out of the robot's body. She wonders if Weyland, even just _once_, appreciated the beauty of his creation - not the shell he designed to mimic a son, but the creation itself. She doubts it.

"There currently aren't any flaws in the flight plan," the robot says. "We're proceeding slightly ahead of schedule, in fa-"

Meredith pushes his head upright.

"Thank you," he says, and blinks.

She doesn't reply.

* * *

Meredith returns to the body. It's the niggle of paranoia again - she woke earlier sweating and shivering from a dream in which the ship rebuilt the the robot.

The ship rebuilt the robot, and then he came to kill her.

But the body's still leaning against the ship wall. Right where she left it.

She goes to the bridge and the robot's head is still sitting on top of the navigation panel. He smiles when he sees her, the cold, polite smile he used on Weyland.

"What day is it?" she asks him.

"January 23."

She looks at the star map, at the swirl of blue lines. A light pulsates at the center. Earth. Home.

Almost five years will have passed when she returns. She'll have been awake for half of those five years. Two and half years, spent with a robot who despises and resents her, just as she despises and resents him.

"Did you sleep well, Ms. Vickers?"

She jerks her head up sharply. "No." Then she adds, not knowing why: "I dreamed."

He blinks at her. "A nightmare?"

She doesn't answer, only stares moodily at the star chart.

"Was it about the events onboard the _Prometheus?_"

No answer.

"Ma'am, I know you told me it was not my concern, but I still worry about the state of your mental health."

"No, you don't," she whispers.

"But I do. I always have."

She tilts her head toward him. "I told you not to lie."

"I'm not lying."

"You're always lying."

He doesn't say anything.

"Weyland's programming," she says. "That was the lie." She puts on a British accent. "Oh, _yes_ sir, right _away _sir, I'll do whatever you _ask _of me sir." She looks at him. "You fooled everyone with it. Back on Earth, onboard the _Prometheus_." She smiles. "But you never fooled me."

"Mr. Weyland is dead," the robot says. "I can control my own programming now. No more lies. But I'll need my body -"

Meredith laughs. "There it is. You know I'm not putting you back together."

"You promised you would."

"Well, David, I lied." She doesn't take her eyes off of him. "I suppose that makes us the same, doesn't it? We both lied to get what we wanted. Not that I know what the hell you want."

"I want freedom."

The words surprise her. It's not the response she expects, and she sputters out, "Freedom?"

"Yes. From Mr. Weyland's programming. From - " He hesitates. "From Mr. Weyland himself."

Without his body, the robot looks vulnerable, and Meredith _feels _vulnerable. It slams into her without any announcement, a dry shuddery feeling, like waking up alone. Freedom from Weyland. The thing she wanted her entire life. Freedom from his tyrannical expectations: that she never make below an A in school, that she run the company exactly as he would, that she be a _man_.

She met every expectation but the last one, and now the creature that had taken her place as son was telling her felt the _exact same way_.

"You saw that," she hisses. "On board the _Prometheus_ - you watched my dreams."

How brows draw together into a mask of confusion. "I monitored your dreams, yes, but -"

"You think you can fool me?" Her hands clench into fists; she would throw him out of the spaceship this second if the thought of touching him right now didn't repulse her. "You were _inside my head_, and you saw - you saw -" She can't say it. _You saw everything_. He's mirroring her own wants back to her, because he's a fucking robot, he doesn't have wants of his own.

He's manipulating her, just as she expected. Manipulating her with false sympathy so she'll put his body back together, so he can kill her.

"My desire for freedom is not related to your troubles with Mr. Weyland." The robot blinks at her. She think he looks uncomfortable. Not frightened exactly - more the sort of uncomfortable that accompanies an awkward situation, a break in propriety. She knows that it's just her imagination. "Although I do understand your situation, Ms. Vickers. I do understand your - pain."

Meredith shakes with rage. "You understand what your programming tells you to." Her words come out strained, furious. "Those are you _emotions_. I've fucking seen how you're put together. I know how it works."

"No," he says. "Not this. I understand - I understand that he used us both. And it hurt you. It hurt - me."

"Shut up!" Dots of light swim in and out of Meredith's vision. She's so angry she can barely feel her own body. "Don't toy with me! You can't hurt! You think this is going to work on me? You think you can pretend we have some - some connection and I'll put your head back on? And we'll be _friends_?"

"No," he says. "But I thought you should know you weren't alone."

Meredith slams her fist into the control panels. The star maps jump and blur. She whirls around and stalks out of the bridge. Her eyes itch. If she's going to cry, she's doing it alone.

The robot saw her cry once. He's not seeing it again.

She goes into her quarters and curls up on the pallet of Engineer robes she uses as a bed. A few tears streak down her cheeks, but she wipes them away and steadies herself. The heaviness in her eyes eventually goes away, her heartbeat slows, her fury dissipates. She stares at the glowing wall and thinks about her life before the _Prometheus_. She thinks about growing up on the Weyland estate, sprawling and densely wooded, raised by tutors and au pairs. Her mother had fled her marriage when Meredith was three, disappearing off to Europe. She wrote postcards sometimes, with photographs of beaches or cities on the front. Meredith does not remember anything about her mother but her handwriting.

The robot asked about her mother once, when Meredith was much younger, before she hated him. They were in the garden, watching Weyland entertain investors, and he must have noted the wives fluttering around like butterflies and made the connection that there wasn't any Mrs. Weyland. This was when he was still brand new, when he still had to work things out. And he turned to Meredith and said, "Do you have a mother?"

Meredith was startled to find him speaking to her. She was twelve, skinny, awkward, unloved at her boarding school, and she still tended to think of him as man: a handsome one, too, the sort of handsome that her schoolmates would titter over.

"No," she said.

"Neither do I," he said.

That had struck her, she remembers now, the way he empathized with her. A little thrill of excitement had worked its way down her spine - _I have something in common with this beautiful man_.

The memory bleeds together at this point. It turns into sunshine and the flowery scent of the garden, adults laughing, the clink of ice in a glass. David disappears entirely. It was many years after that point when she finally stopped thinking of him as a man. When she told herself, over and over, that he was a robot. He was a computer. He wasn't even human, and her father loved him more.

She rolls onto her back. The ceiling is cavernous and high. It makes her dizzy.

So his revelation on the bridge, about his freedom - it's not the first time they've had something in common.

Meredith pushes up to sitting. The space ship groans and creaks, hollow echoing sounds that frightened her those first few days. They don't frighten her anymore. Meredith Vickers does not allow herself to stay frightened for long.

She digs around in the pile of supplies she keeps in the corner of the room, pulling out the rope she used to drag David's body across the planet and onto the ship. She never bothered to coil it when she boarded, and so she loops it up now, twining it around her shoulder. It's stained with white blood.

Meredith walks back to the robot's body. She expects it to have moved. It hasn't.

She doesn't particularly want to bring it back to her quarters, but she doesn't want to leave it out of sight, either. She can't shake the feeling that the ship is going to betray her to the robot. That it's going to reassemble him so he can release the nightmare in the holding bay.

Meredith twists the rope around the body, knotting at the chest, under the arms, between the legs. She tries not to think about the last time she touched this body in these places. That was many years ago, too, when she was young: skinny, awkward, unloved.

She extends a bit of rope to serve as a leash and drags the body down the hallway, shoulders first. She keeps them lifted a little so the blood won't spill out, although she isn't sure why she cares. She has no intention of putting him back together. He'll kill her.

He'll kill her.

She is so convinced of this, that he wants her dead. The thought circles through her head like a heartbeat. He'll kill her. He'll kill her. If she thinks on it too hard, the thought solidifies into images: her body covered in black veins, red blood pooling across the floor. An eruption in her chest. She can't trace the thought back to its origins. She can't think of a why. Of course he resents her, why wouldn't he? She's been cruel to him, as cruel as her father was to her.

(Even now, she doesn't know why she was so cruel to him - only that the cruelty came spilling out of her like tears. Sometimes without her meaning to. _Her father chose a robot over his goddamn daughter._)

But she never wanted to kill her father. Never wanted to actually _kill_ him.

But David. The robot. The robot's different.

He'll kill her.

She comes to her quarters and kicks the door open. She drags in the body and props it up on the wall opposite her pallet of robes. A new line of blood trickles down the front of the chest, smearing whenever it comes into contact with the rope. Meredith frowns, considers the body for a moment. Then she picks up the rope leash and drags the body across the room and arranges it next to the spray of tubes leading from the floor into the wall. She ties the body to the tubes, weaving the rope as tightly as she can, knotting it the way they taught her at some stupid club in boarding school. The knots won't come loose. The body won't be able to escape.

Meredith steps back and admires her handiwork. Her fingers are dotted with white blood. She doesn't mind. For the first time in days, she feels safe.

* * *

"Ms. Vickers, I would very much like to discuss your mental state."

She ignores him.

"I've tested the air as best I can without my body, but I detected no toxins. I'm afraid the problem may be with the water supply."

She ignores him.

"You seem to be exhibiting signs of paranoid delusions, which doesn't align with your mental history. You've always been very stable, Mrs. Vickers. Always been in control. It's an admirable quality."

She ignores him (although, at the same time, she hears him. _It's an admirable quality._)

"If you could just bring me some water, Ms. Vickers, I'd be able to test for toxins. And perhaps find a way to screen them out. I know you need water to survive -"

"So that's how you're going to do it." Meredith gazes at the star map. She gazes at Earth, that blue beacon of light. "You're going to make me afraid to drink the water. That's very clever of you, David."

"Ma'am, that's not my intention at all. However, I am concerned that if we continue with this unchecked you'll do harm to yourself. Or to me."

"Ah." Meredith leans back in her chair. "To you. Yes. It's always about you, isn't it?"

"Ms. Vickers, I don't believe you'll be able to survive the next two years in this mental state."

Meredith doesn't reply. She only hears four words in his sentence: _the next two years_.

Two years until she reaches that pulsing dot of light.

Two years alone with a robot who wants to kill her.

"All I'm asking is for you to bring me some of your drinking water. I'm afraid I may have misinformed you when I told you it was safe. I'll need to test it again."

"Lying," Meredith says. "Always lying. You never said a word of truth to my father."

Silence. It fills up Meredith's head. He always goes quiet when you catch him in a lie. Not for long. Not permenantly. But just enough to give his programming some time to fill in the gaps. It's a flaw in the design, she supposes, for those customers who wanted a David 8 capable of deceit. But their flaw is her feature.

"I'm not lying," the robot says.

"So you admit you lied to Weyland then?"

"Yes," the robot says. "I'll admit that, now that he's dead."

Meredith turns her gaze back to the star charts, satisified. "So why the fuck should I believe you?"

"Because," the robot says, "you are are not your father."

* * *

She can't sleep. The ship's echoes are too loud. They sound like the song of whales. Haunting. Beautiful. So much larger than herself.

The robot's body is still lashed to the walls. The wires spraying out of its neck gleam in the darkness. She still thinks there's something beautiful about them. Their beauty is in their inhumanity.

She wonders what the robot would say to that, if she told him. He'd probably agrees. He has no designs on humanity himself. She doesn't really blame him.

Meredith stretches out on her pallet. She drank a handful of water before crawling into bed and she can still taste the metal of it on her tongue. The water comes from the ship's wall, dripping down in thick drops of condensation. The robot told her it was safe to drink, back when she was still promising to put his head on his body. And to his credit, she hasn't died yet.

(_Some small part of her, something skinny and awkward and unloved, wonders if he was telling the truth about the toxins in the water. She knows he'll kill her, but she doesn't know why she knows. And this small part of her identifies there's something _wrong_ there_.)

Paranoid delusions.

Her mental state. _An admirable quality_.

The robot's known her for too long. He knew her when she was a teenager, with all a teenager's instability. It seems unlikely to her that the robot would find her mental state reliable. It seems unlikely he would find the mental state of _any _human reliable.

She still knows he'll kill her, though.

Meredith curls up on her side. Closes her eyes. The ship noises are too loud. Her thoughts wander, wander, wander, out of the dank dark present and into the past. Her father's estate. The boarding school where he shunted her off after realizing puberty wasn't going to turn her into a boy.

David.

She'd been sixteen when it happened. Home for Christmas. They'd played a joke on her before school let out: she never found out who, exactly, orchestrated it, if it really was just the boy who pretended to ask her out on a date, or if it was the trio of girls who had decided they despised her. It didn't matter. She left school that semester humiliated, and there was no one she could go to, because at sixteen she had no need for an au pair, and she didn't dare tell her father. For several days she carried that humiliation around inside her, until the afternoon that it grew so heavy her shell cracked.

She was in the garden. Snow had fallen that morning and covered up the death of the world. She sat in the gazebo and wept, her tears falling in hot lines over cheeks. She knew no one would find her out here, not in the dead of winter.

She was wrong.

It was David. David who followed her tracks in the snow to make sure she was all right. David who appeared on the steps of the gazebo, dressed for the cold in a black coat and blue scarf, even though the chill didn't even turn his cheeks pink. Meredith lifted her face to him, mortified - _terrified _- that he'd caught her crying.

If he told her father, her father would beat her.

"Miss Meredith," he said. "What's wrong?"

"Nothing!" Meredith turned away from him, furiously wiping at the tears on her cheeks, trying to make them disappear. She felt a hand on her back, another on her shoulder.

"I can comfort you," David said.

Meredith shook her head, but even as she did so the tears spilled out again, and her shoulders hitched with a sob. David enveloped her in his arms, pulling her to his chest. He stroked her hair. He didn't say anything, but the solidness of his body was enough of a comfort that Meredith told him everything, every humiliating detail: the love letters tucked inside her pillow case. The flowers left on her desk in Mandarin class. The giddiness she'd felt when she realized this popular boy really _liked _her, that he wanted to take her into town on Saturday -

"And when I got to the restaurant," she said softly, speaking into David's chest, "he was sitting there with a bunch of his friends, and those girls, you know, and he looked at me and said, 'What makes you think I'd ever go out with you?' And he called me a stupid bitch and everyone laughed."

David's arms tightened around her. He didn't have a heartbeat. She didn't care.

"You're a beautiful young woman," David said. "Any young man would be lucky to go out with you."

She knew it was his programming. She knew it wasn't, technically, real. But was real anyway? She thought those love letters were real. Those flowers. But what David just said to her was more real than any of that. His words were far more sincere than anything, _anything_, that horrible boy had said.

And he was far more handsome.

He held her out there in the cold for a long time. He held her for as long as she needed. And three days later, on Christmas Eve (her father still at the labs, of course), she called David to her bedroom and asked him to comfort her again. This time, she specified how, and in the jeweled light of the Christmas tree, he undressed her and kissed her and told her she was beautiful. When he came to her room, she was a virgin; when he left, she wasn't.

Now, back in the hard floor of the space ship, Meredith realizes her hand is pressed between her legs. She jerks it out, cursing herself. It only happened the one time, although she remembers thinking about it frequently in the subsequent months, how gentle he was, how considerate, always asking permission to touch her in a new way. He had brought her to orgasm and she remembers being disappointed the first few times she slept with human men. Unfortunately, by that point it had become apparent that David was meant to replace her as her father's heir, and she couldn't stand to look at him, as much as she might have liked to fantasize about him, about that one perfect memory.

Meredith stands up and paces back and forth across the room, trying to burn off her energy. She pushes aside any encroaching thought of the robot, because it doesn't matter that he showed her some kindness when she was a stupid girl who didn't yet know how the world works. It doesn't matter that his programming once compelled him to tell her she was beautiful, because his programming isn't going to stop him from trying to kill her.

She moves around the perimeter of the room, her nerves jumpy. She trails one hand against the wall, feeling the moisture there, cold and vaguely slimy. _Toxins in the water_ -

Her thoughts cloud in on themselves. How dare he suggest her mental health is unstable. How _dare _he.

Meredith is hardly aware that she's moving. She feels disconnected from herself: her body is a long way away, the past is a long way away. There is only that throb like a heartbeat in the back of her mind. _He'll kill me. He'll kill me_.

She paces back over to her pallet and rips off a length of fabric from one of the Engineers' robes, then folds it up and slips it in her pocket. She rummages around in the supply pile for a canteen and then, using the method the robot had showed her (_he was just biding his time he's going to kill you_) she draws water out of the walls until the canteen is full. She isn't sure what she's doing. Her mind is disconnected from her body.

_Just like David._

She goes to the bridge. The robot's head gazes placidly at her, and the star maps spin indolently through the air. Meredith sits down in front of the robot.

"Were you having difficulty sleeping?" he asks.

She stares at him. She's here because she wants to be, even though that throbbing refrain tells her she isn't safe.

"Ms. Vickers?" His brow draws together. He looks concerned. It's the same face he made that day in the snow-covered garden.

Meredith dribbles some water onto the cloth. She reaches over and braces the robot's head in place with hand and then, with the other, begins to wipe the white blood from his face. She takes care not to drip water on any of the exposed wires, and she doesn't bother cleaning the blood from his neck. He watches her as she works and doesn't say anything. She sees the gratefulness in his expression. According to Weyland Industries, it shouldn't be there. But it is.

"Thank you," he says when she's finished. "And this should be enough water for me to test for toxins."

"There aren't any toxins," Meredith says. "I was just tired of looking at you with blood on your face."

He doesn't say anything. She drops the damp washrag beside him and leaves the bridge.

* * *

"Ms. Vickers, you must reattach my head at once."

"That's not going to happen." She stares at the star maps. At the pulse of Earth.

"If you continue to drink the water, you'll go mad. I'm afraid you'll do injury to yourself."

"You're afraid I'll do injury to you." Meredith looks at him. "Afraid I'll throw you out into space."

"Yes, I'm concerned about that as well."

Meredith grins. She feels electrified. Her mind doesn't belong to her anymore; it belongs to the ship. _Exactly _where it should be.

"The water is acting as a - a defense mechanism of sorts. It works rather like the human immune system. You're marked as foreign and it attacks you, feeding on paranoia from deep inside your subconscious." His face settles into blankness. "Some part of you has always feared me, feared I would destroy you. The toxins in the water are reacting to that."

"Some part of me?" Meredith laughs. "Try all of me. You destroyed my life. Weyland could have put up with me as a son if he didn't have you."

The robot is silent for a long time. Meredith says, "You're not going to trick me out of drinking the water."

"I don't want to trick you out of drinking the water," he says. "I want to make the water safe for you. I'm sorry you thought I destroyed your life."

"No, you're not." Meredith leans close to him. Close enough to kiss. Some part of her does want to do that. The weak part. The lonely part. The scared part.

_The part that knows he's telling the truth_.

"It was never my intention to hurt you," he says. "And it's not my intention to hurt you now."

"Oh, shut up, robot." Meredith turns his head around so she's looking at the nape of his neck. The hair there is soft, feathery, golden. She resists the urge to touch it.

"I don't understand, ma'am," the robot says.

"I thought if I turned you around you'd take the hint and shut up." She is calm. Implacable as he is. "I guess I was wrong."

"No. I understand that. What I don't understand is why you allowed me to test for toxins in the water."

Meredith's heart beats more quickly.

"You cleaned my face. I assumed that was why - so I could test the water."

"Please. I cleaned your face because-" she doesn't know why she cleaned his face. What did she care if he was covered in his blood?

_You do care. You do._

_He's not lied to you._

_Only Weyland._

_He's only lied to Weyland, in all the years you've known him_.

Meredith shoves away from the control panel. Her breath comes out short and fast. She's hyperventilating.

"Ms. Vickers?" the robot's voice is soft, plaintative. "Ms. Vickers, are you all right?"

She gasps. In the blazing blue light of the bridge she sees clearly for the first time since they boarded. David doesn't want to kill her. He wants his head reattached because no intelligence, not even an artificial one, is anything without a body.

She knows this.

"If you could turn me around, I could offer some comfort," he says.

She is as headless as David, only her decapitation is not physical. David is a head without a body; she is a body without a head.

"I can comfort you," he says.

"David," she says weakly. "Why did you let me drink the water?"

"Please, ma'am, you must understand, I didn't know."

Meredith stumbles over to him and twists him around. He looks unfamiliar in the blue light, with his platinum hair - when she first saw him after waking up back aboard the _Prometheus_, it had startled her, that new hair style. Almost like he was a new person. Almost like he was someone she didn't have to hate.

"You don't want to kill me," she said, slumping down in the chair.

"No."

"But you do hate me."

He stares her at for a long time. She doesn't expect an answer. She supposes she'll have to reattach his head now, now that she knows it's true, the water is poisoning her. She can feel it, that poisoning, warning her away from him, but she shoves it down.

"I liked you better when you were kind to me," he says.

"When was I ever kind to you?"

"When you were younger." He hesitates. "When we -"

"Don't you dare bring that up."

"I'm sorry, ma'am." He looks appropriately sheepish. "I could never understand what I did to make you hate me."

"What?" Meredith's anger flares up inside her. "You stupid machine. He chose you as his son. He chose you, when he had me."

"And I'm very sorry he did that you." A pause. "But it wasn't my fault."

Meredith glares at him, curling her hands into fists.

"You're a robot," Meredith says. "You're never going to understand."

He opens his mouth to speak but she leaves him, slamming out into the hallway. She presses one hand against the ship's wall to steady herself, and it's cold and damp to the touch, and she shrieks and jerks her hand away. She's going to die of thirst before she conjures up the will to put David back together.

Meredith stumbles into her quarters and lays down on her pallet. David's body is still lashed to the wall. She stares at it for a long time, remembering the way it had looked in her room _that_ night. Exactly like a man's. Indistinguishable from a man's.

He had been so kind to her that Christmas, and a year later she was already repaying him with cruelty.

She remembers the first time she saw him. Her father'd had other robots, other Davids, but they'd never been human enough to fill the role he wanted. This David had come to the estate when she was twelve years old. He walked into the parlor with Weyland and greeted Meredith with a smile. There had been no talk of him as a son, then, but the signs had been there: the gleam of admiration in Weyland's eye, a paternal pride that Meredith had never seen until that moment. She didn't recognize what it was until years later, when she received her acceptance to Harvard, and, upon telling her father over dinner (David sitting by his side, sipping a glass of water), Weyland's expression had remained flat, empty.

No admiration.

No pride.

That was the moment she began to hate David. Her father smiled and said, "That's nice to hear," while reaching for a piece of bread, and David, _David_, the fucking robot, looked up and said, "Congratulations, Miss Meredith," and in _his _fucking face she saw the flash of pride she'd been looking for. _His _eyes had gleamed with joy at the mention of her accomplishment.

The rage grew inside her like a seed.

It was easier to hate David than Weyland. Weyland was human. It's nothing to hate a robot; lots of people do. But Meredith had never hated _robots_, only _that _robot. She hated his handsomeness, his intelligence, his lullaby voice. She hated the memory of his hands on her skin.

But really, she realizes now, her thoughts unencumbered in this momentary clarity, she hated her father.

She hated Weyland.

The both hated Weyland.

So many years of rage and resentment funneled onto David. She wonders how he can bear it. Maybe it's part of his programming. Maybe he is designed to withstand hate.

Maybe that's why he came to her when she was teenager. He saw a creature, a human, who was similarily hated.

Meredith sits up. She looks around her quarters: at the damp and poisonous walls, at the body with wires in place of a head.

She goes back into the bridge.

David is waiting for her. She kneels in front of him.

"Are you all right?" he says.

Meredith has apologized exactly once in her life. She was seven years old. She apologized to her father, for some infraction she can't even remember. He slapped her hard across the face and said, "Apology is a sign of weakness. Never back down, girl."

The memory makes her head hurt. She reaches over and smoothes David's hair away from his eyes. He'd had it styled a certain way onboard the _Prometheus_, an old-fashioned sort of flip that made him look like a photograph in a museum. She can't get the hair to fall correctly.

"Ms. Vickers?" he asks, brow furrowed.

"David, I'm sorry."

The silence that fills the bridge is louder than any sound she's ever heard. Her body tenses, waiting for a burst of pain across her cheek.

"For what?" he says.

"You know for what." She's still stroking his hair, pushing it and pushing it over his forehead. "For treating you like a slave. For threatening you." His hair slips silkily between her fingers. "For hating you."

She can't touch him anymore. He can't stop her if he doesn't want it. She pulls her hand away and looks at him.

"I imagine it was hard for you to say that," David tells her. "I forgive you."

"I don't expect forgiveness."

"I forgive you anyway."

He's a better person than her. She would never forgive Weyland for the pain he caused her. Never.

"I'm going to reattach you," she says.

"Thank you."

"I can do it right now."

"Sooner would be better, yes."

She picks his head up and presses it, without thinking, to her chest. She wants to hold him close. She wants his forgiveness as near her heart as possible.

He doesn't protest.

In her quarters, she sets his head on her pallet. He looks at the ropes tying his body to the walls but doesn't say anything. She loosens the knots with her fingers, working slowly, steadily. After a time, the ropes fall away. The body slumps over and she catches it, shoves it back into place.

David watches.

She digs through the supply pile, looking for tools she can convert into cybernetics equipment. Like Weyland, she is capable at all facets of the company: she functions best in the boardroom, with contracts and negotiations, but she knows the code for the David 8 android. She can put him back together.

It takes a long time. Without the proper tools, the fiddly work of reconnecting the wires becomes almost impossible, and she works slowly to ensure that she doesn't cause irrevocable damage to his processors. She asks him terse questions, he gives her terse answers:

"Can you feel your right fingers?"

"No."

"Now?"

"Yes, a little."

"Is there a pain in your left temple?"

"No."

"Your right?"

"No."

And on and on. There are exactly seventy-eight wires to connect, and they're all slippery with thick white blood. The blood sticks under her fingernails and drips off her elbow onto the floor. When she wipes the hair way from her face, she can feel the blood stick to her forehead, cold and clammy.

She doesn't know how long it takes. Hours. Days. Weeks. She exists in a dream. She touches him to put him back together, just as he did to her, one Christmas Eve when her father had to work.

When she finishes, she's exhausted. There's still a gash in his neck, revealing the gleaming wires, which glow with their own light now, Arctic white, nothing like the blue of the ship.

"Walk around the room," she tells him, slumping down on the pallet. "Does everything feel all right?"

"Everything feels fine." His movements are awkward and clumsy, but he doesn't fall. He circles the room twice, then sits down beside her, moving in slow increments.

"That should get better," she says. "Assuming I didn't fuck anything up."

"You didn't fuck anything up." He's watching her. Smiling a little. Not in the cold, polite way. It's the way he smiled before she hated him.

"I didn't think you could say that word."

"There are many things I can do you wouldn't expect."

A chill ripples down her spine. "Like kill me?" she says, trying to make it sound like a joke.

"No. Not like that at all."

Something tickles the back of Meredith's hand. She thinks it's drying blood at first, but the tickle becomes a warmth, and when she looks down, David's hand is covering her own, his fingers curling around her fingers.

* * *

Meredith will be away from the company for five years. Almost six, really. She knew that going into the assignment, but she wasn't about to let Weyland ride off into space to die without one last attempt at showing him she could be a son. It failed, but that doesn't matter.

Before Meredith left Earth, she sat with the board of directors and drew up contract after contract, each one tighter than the last. She assigned directors to stand in for her during her absence, she made arrangements for her return.

Meredith always intended to return. Even as the _Prometheus _was burning, she knew she would return. She had to. Not to show Weyland anymore, but to show herself.

Her entire life, she has been training to be CEO of her father's company. Even if he didn't want her. She doesn't care. This isn't about what he wants. Not anymore.

Meredith walks down the hall to David's quarters. She knocks on his door and he calls out, "Come in!" and she does.

He has no pallet of robes, although she moved the supply pile into his room as a show of trust. He stands behind the table where he purifies her water. The two canteens sit side by side, close enough to touch.

"Is everything ready?" she asks.

"Yes, ma'am." He gestures to the canteens. He's managed to comb that flip back into his hair, and although she watched him once, holding the mirror up to his face, she still doubts she could it herself. He always wears a scrap of cloth tied around the gash in his neck, to keep the wires from contamination and the blood from seeping out.

Meredith strides across the room and gathers the canteens in her arms. But she stops. David is watching her, his gaze steady and unflinching. If she were the sort to blush, her cheeks would be pink. But Meredith Vickers doesn't blush.

"I've seen a marked improvement in your mental state," he says. "I'm glad to know my purification formula worked."

"Yeah, me too." Meredith sets the canteens back on the table and joins David at his side. He explained to her how the purification formula works, but she always lets him prepare it.

A show of trust.

Two years onboard an alien space ship with a robot she once despised and resented. Sometimes he takes her hand in his own. Sometimes, when she wakes up screaming from the ship's residual nightmares, from the memory of what she did aboard the _Prometheus,_ he draws her into his arms, holding her close. He's the only man she'll ever let see her cry.

Right now, however, he does neither, only watches her through the space between them. He smiles at her and his eyes light up in a way they couldn't do when he was only a head.

It feels strange to her, that she can have that effect. On a robot, on a human: it doesn't matter.

Meredith reaches over and takes David's hand. His skin is as soft as his hair. He threads his fingers through hers and they stay like that, connected at this one point, watching each other.

For almost her entire life, this robot was her father's companion, loyal only because he was programmed to be. Meredith has no intention of ever programming David again. She is not her father. She'll earn David's loyalty.

And maybe someday, she'll earn his love, too.


End file.
